NC Republicans in Congress got a stinging lesson in democracy from Zelensky
Gene Nichol – March 27, 2022
FILE
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the U.S. Congress was a hallmark in the history of democracy. It echoed, in word and deed, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Churchill after Dunkirk, Martin Luther King from Montgomery in March, 1965.
It instructed a calcified, ancient and often unserious democracy on the meaning and human centrality of government by the people.
It taught, once again, that democratic politics can be the most ennobling and heroic of undertakings. It is not relegated to the hatred-driven and timidity-infused version that dominates our assemblies. It provided a much needed, if likely still insufficient, jolt to self-satisfied American lawmakers.
The undaunted and courageous Ukrainian president reminded that “Russia has attacked not just us, our land, our cities,” but, more foundationally, it has launched “a brutal offensive against basic human values.” It has “thrown tanks and planes against our freedom, against our right to live freely in our own country, (against our power) to choose our own future.” Russia demands to be master to the slave.
Zelensky’s oration also included censure. Some was intentional, pointed — calling on us, “in the darkest times to do more,” urging President Biden to be “leader of the world for peace.”
Yet another rebuke, I thought, was likely accidental, ancillary. Zelensky explained:
“Just like anyone in the United States, I remember your national memorial in Rushmore, the faces of your prominent presidents who laid the foundation for America as it is today: democracy, independence, freedom, and care for every person, for everyone who works diligently, who lives honestly, who respects the law. We in Ukraine want the same for our people.”
No one can doubt how powerfully Zelensky strives for these fundamentals in his re-born nation. And, of course, it’s hard to be sure how much Zelensky actually knows of the reality of modern American political life. He has, at the moment, somewhat larger fish to fry. Though, it must be conceded, Zelensky himself has had to stare down the United States’ most dangerous, lawless, and dishonest tyrant.
Still, Zelensky’s testament to defining creed inevitably reminded the rest of us that much of our nation now rejects the teachings of Rushmore. Re-read the list. Can there be any doubt that the most popular and dominant Republican in North Carolina, Donald Trump, despises each and every one of these constitutive notions? The entirety of his political career is a battle against them.
Trump’s Tar Heel consigliere, Mark Meadows, was literally caught on tape facilitating his boss’ efforts to force Georgia officials to overturn the presidential election. Madison Cawthorn not only fostered the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, but , voted to oppose various Russian sanctions, and pressed for violence if Republicans fail to achieve office — as if the American democracy was merely a white man’s gun club.
Virginia Foxx gleefully made the successful motion to expel Liz Cheney from Republican House leadership for refusing to endorse Trump’s lies. Foxx called Cheney “a leader with no followers,” almost bragging about the absence of character in the Republican caucus.
Dan Bishop, Ted Budd, Richard Hudson, David Rouzer, Cawthorn and Foxx locked arms with Republican colleagues, amazingly, to lawlessly reject state electoral college certifications. The N.C. Republican Party censured Sen. Richard Burr for saying the rule of law applied to Trump. It spoke not a word against Cawthorn’s embrace of violent sedition.
These powerful N.C. Republicans must have felt a stinging discomfort at Zelensky’s soul-stirring address. No one wants a soul to be stirred after he’s bartered his own.
Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is the Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina.
Russian President Vladimir Putin holds a meeting with winners of state culture prizes via a video link at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow on March 25, 2022. – President Putin on March 25 slammed the West for discriminating against Russian culture, saying it was like the ceremonial burning of books by Nazi supporters in the 1930s. (Photo by Mikhail KLIMENTYEV / SPUTNIK / AFP) (Photo by MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images) (MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV via Getty Images)
PARIS — Speaking in what he called “the language of Goethe, Schiller and Kant,” picked up during his time as a KGB officer in Dresden, Germany, President Vladimir Putin of Russia addressed the German Parliament on Sept. 25, 2001. “Russia is a friendly European nation,” he declared. “Stable peace on the continent is a paramount goal for our nation.”
The Russian leader, elected the previous year at the age of 47 after a meteoric rise from obscurity, went on to describe “democratic rights and freedoms” as the “key goal of Russia’s domestic policy.” Members of the Bundestag gave a standing ovation.
Norbert Röttgen, a center-right representative who headed the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee for several years, was among those who rose to their feet. “Putin captured us,” he said. “The voice was quite soft, in German, a voice that tempts you to believe what is said to you. We had some reason to think there was a viable perspective of togetherness.”
Today, all togetherness shredded, Ukraine burns, bludgeoned by the invading army Putin sent to prove his conviction that Ukrainian nationhood is a myth. More than 3.7 million Ukrainians are refugees; the dead mount up in a month-old war; and that purring voice of Putin has morphed into the angry rant of a hunched man dismissing as “scum and traitors” any Russian who resists the violence of his tightening dictatorship.
His opponents will meet an ugly fate, Putin vowed this month, grimacing as his planned blitzkrieg in Ukraine stalled. True Russians, he said, would “spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths” and so achieve “a necessary self-purification of society.”
This was less the language of Kant than of fascist nationalist exaltation laced with Putin’s hardscrabble, brawling St. Petersburg youth.
Between these voices of reason and incitation, between these two seemingly different men, lie 22 years of power and five United States presidents. As China rose, as the U.S. fought and lost its forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as technology networked the world, a Russian enigma took form in the Kremlin.
Did the U.S. and its allies, through excess of optimism or naiveté, simply get Putin wrong from the outset? Or was he transformed over time into the revanchist warmonger of today?
Putin is an enigma, but he is also the most public of figures. Seen from the perspective of his reckless gamble in Ukraine, a picture emerges of a man who seized on almost every move by the West as a slight against Russia — and perhaps also himself. As the grievances mounted, the distinction blurred. In effect, he became the state, he merged with Russia, their fates fused in an increasingly Messianic vision of restored imperial glory.
From the Ashes of Empire
“The temptation of the West for Putin was, I think, chiefly that he saw it as instrumental to building a great Russia,” said Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state who met several times with Putin during the first phase of his rule. “He was always obsessed with the 25 million Russians trapped outside Mother Russia by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again and again he raised this. That is why, for him, the end of the Soviet empire was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.”
But if irredentist resentment lurked, alongside a Soviet spy’s suspicion of the U.S., Putin had other initial priorities. He was a patriotic servant of the state. The post-communist Russia of the 1990s, led by Boris Yeltsin, the country’s first freely elected leader, had sundered.
In 1993, Yeltsin ordered the Parliament shelled to put down an insurgency; 147 people were killed. The West had to provide Russia with humanitarian aid, so dire was its economic collapse, so pervasive its extreme poverty, as large swaths of industry were sold off for a song to an emergent class of oligarchs. All this, to Putin, represented mayhem.
“He hated what happened to Russia, hated the idea the West had to help it,” said Christoph Heusgen, the chief diplomatic adviser to former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany between 2005 and 2017. Putin’s first political manifesto for the 2000 presidential campaign was all about reversing Western efforts to transfer power from the state to the marketplace.
The new president would work with the oligarchs created by chaotic, free-market, crony capitalism — so long as they showed absolute fealty. Failing that, they would be expunged. If this was democracy, it was “sovereign democracy,” a phrase embraced by Putin’s top political strategists, stress on the first word.
Marked, to some degree, by his home city of St. Petersburg, built by Peter the Great in the early 18th century as a “window to Europe,” and by his initial political experience there from 1991 working in the mayor’s office to attract foreign investment, Putin does appear to have been guardedly open to the West early in his rule.
He mentioned the possibility of Russian membership of NATO to former President Bill Clinton in 2000, an idea that never went anywhere. He maintained a Russian partnership agreement signed with the European Union in 1994. A NATO-Russia Council was established in 2002. Petersburg man vied with Homo Sovieticus.
This was a delicate balancing act, for which the disciplined Putin was prepared. “You should never lose control,” he told American movie director Oliver Stone in “The Putin Interviews,” a 2017 documentary.
“You must understand, he is from the KGB, lying is his profession, it is not a sin,” said Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador in Moscow from 2017 to 2020.
A few months before the Bundestag speech, Putin famously won over former President George W. Bush, who, after their first meeting in June 2001, said he had looked into the Russian president’s eyes and found him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Yeltsin, similarly swayed, anointed Putin as his successor just three years after he arrived in Moscow in 1996.
An Authoritarian’s Rise
Born in 1952 in a city then called Leningrad, Putin grew up in the shadow of the Soviets’ war with Nazi Germany. The immense sacrifices of the Red Army in defeating Nazism were not abstract but palpable within his modest family. Putin learned young that, as he put it, “the weak get beat.”
“The West did not take sufficient account of the strength of Soviet myth, military sacrifice and revanchism in him,” said Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin,” whose grandparents were all Russian. “He believes deeply that Russian man is prepared to sacrifice himself for an idea, whereas Western man likes success and comfort.”
Putin brought a measure of that comfort to Russia in the first eight years of his presidency. The economy galloped ahead, foreign investment poured in.
The problem for Putin was that to diversify an economy, the rule of law helps. He had studied law at St. Petersburg University and claimed to respect it. In fact, power proved to be his lodestone.
Timothy Snyder, a prominent historian of fascism, put it this way: “Having toyed with an authoritarian rule-of-law state, he simply become the oligarch-in-chief and turned the state into the enforcer mechanism of his oligarchical clan.”
Still, the biggest country on Earth needed more than economic recovery to stand tall once more. Putin had been formed in a Soviet world that held that Russia was not a great power unless it dominated its neighbors. Rumblings at the country’s doorstep challenged that doctrine.
In November 2003, the Rose Revolution in Georgia set that country firmly on a Western course. In 2004 — the year of NATO’s second post-Cold War expansion, which brought in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia — massive street protests, known as the Orange Revolution, erupted in Ukraine. They, too, stemmed from a rejection of Moscow and the embrace of a Western future.
Putin’s turn from cooperation with the West to confrontation began. It would be slow but the general direction was set.
A Clash With the West
From 2004 onward, a distinct hardening of Putin’s Russia became evident.
The president scrapped elections for regional governors in late 2004, turning them into Kremlin appointees. Russian TV increasingly looked like Soviet TV in its undiluted propaganda.
Although Putin has portrayed a West-leaning Ukraine as a threat to Russian security, it was more immediately a threat to Putin’s authoritarian system itself. Radek Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, said: “Putin is of course right that a democratic Ukraine integrated with Europe and successful is a mortal threat to Putinism. That, more than NATO membership, is the issue.”
The Russian president does not take well to mortal threats, real or imagined. If anyone had doubted Putin’s ruthlessness, they stood corrected by 2006. His loathing of weakness dictated a proclivity for violence. Yet Western democracies were slow to absorb this basic lesson.
They needed Russia, and not only for its oil and gas. The Russian president was an important potential ally in what came to be called the global war on terror. It meshed with his own war in Chechnya and with a tendency to see himself as part of a civilizational battle on behalf of Christianity.
But Putin was far less comfortable with Bush’s “freedom agenda,” announced in his second inaugural of January 2005, a commitment to promote democracy across the world in pursuit of a neoconservative vision.
Arriving in Moscow as the U.S. ambassador in 2005, William Burns, now the CIA director, sent a sober cable, all post-Cold War optimism dispelled. “Russia is too big, too proud, and too self-conscious of its own history to fit neatly into a ‘Europe whole and free,’” he wrote.
When François Hollande, the former French president, met Putin several years later, he was surprised to find him referring to Americans as “Yankees” — and in scathing terms. These Yankees had “humiliated us, put us in second position,” Putin told him.
These grudges came to a head in Putin’s ferocious speech in 2007 to the Munich Security Conference. “One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way,” he declared to a shocked audience. A “unipolar world” had been imposed after the Cold War with “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making.”
The result was a world “in which there is one master, one sovereign, and at the end of the day this is pernicious.” More than pernicious, it was “extremely dangerous,” resulting “in the fact that nobody feels safe.”
The Threat of NATO Expansion
After the Munich speech, Germany still had hopes for Putin. Merkel, raised in East Germany, a Russian speaker, had formed a relationship with him. “There was an affinity,” said Heusgen. “An understanding.”
Working with Putin could not mean dictating to him, however. “We deeply believed it would not be good to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO,” Heusgen said. “They would bring instability.” Article 10 of the NATO Treaty, as Heusgen noted, says any new member must be in a position to “contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” Just how the two contested countries would do that was unclear to Merkel.
The U.S., however, with the Bush presidency in its last year, was in no mood to compromise. Bush wanted a “membership action plan,” or MAP, for Ukraine and Georgia, a specific commitment to bringing the two countries into the alliance, to be announced at the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania.
Burns, as ambassador, was opposed. In a then-classified message to Rice, he wrote: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”
Already, in February 2008, the U.S. and many of its allies had recognized the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, a unilateral declaration rejected as illegal by Russia and seen as an affront to a fellow Slav nation.
France joined Germany in Bucharest in opposing the MAP for Georgia and Ukraine.
The compromise was messy. The NATO leaders’ declaration said that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” But it stopped short of endorsing an action plan that would make such membership possible. Ukraine and Georgia were left with an empty promise while Russia was at once angered and offered a glimpse of a division it could later exploit.
Putin came to Bucharest and delivered what Rice described as an “emotional speech,” suggesting Ukraine was a made-up country, noting the presence of 17 million Russians there, and calling Kyiv the mother of all Russian cities — a claim that would develop into an obsession.
Us Versus Them
On May 7, 2012, as a 30-gun salute echoed over Moscow and riot police officers in camouflage rounded up protesters, Putin returned to the Russian presidency. Bristling and increasingly convinced of Western perfidy and decadence, he was in many respects a changed man.
The outbreak of large street protests five months earlier, with marchers bearing signs that said “Putin is a thief,” had cemented his conviction that the U.S. was determined to bring a color revolution to Russia.
Putin accused then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of being the primary instigator.
Still, the idea that Putin posed any serious threat to U.S. interests was largely dismissed in a Washington focused on defeating al-Qaida.
Russia, under U.S. pressure, had abstained in a 2011 United Nations Security Council vote for military intervention in Libya, which authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. When this mission, in Putin’s perception, morphed into the pursuit of the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi, who was killed by Libyan forces, the Russian president was furious. This was yet further confirmation of America’s international lawlessness.
Something else was at work. “He was haunted by the brutal takeout of Gadhafi,” said Mark Medish, who was senior director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton presidency.
Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador to Syria and now a special adviser to the Institut Montaigne think tank in Paris, places Putin’s definitive “choice of repolarization” in 2012. “He had become convinced that the West was in decline after the 2008 financial crisis,” Duclos said. “The way forward now was confrontation.”
When Putin traveled to Kyiv in July 2013, on a visit to mark the 1,025th anniversary of the conversion to Christianity of Prince Vladimir of the Kyivan Rus, he vowed to protect “our common Fatherland, Great Rus.”
A Leader Emboldened
The 22-year arc of Putin’s exercise of power is in many ways a study of growing audacity. Intent at first at restoring order in Russia and gaining international respect, he became convinced that a Russia rich in oil revenue and new high-tech weaponry could strut the world, deploy military force and meet scant resistance.
If Putin was, as he now seemed to believe, the personification of Russia’s mystical great-power destiny, all constraints were off.
Ukraine, by ousting its Moscow-backed leader in a bloody popular uprising in February 2014, and so de facto rejecting Putin’s multibillion-dollar blandishments to join his Eurasian Union rather than pursue an association agreement with the EU, committed the unpardonable. This, for Putin, was, he insisted, a U.S.-backed “coup.”
Putin’s annexation of Crimea and orchestration of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine that created two Russian-backed breakaway regions followed.
Two decades earlier, in 1994, Russia had signed an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up its vast nuclear arsenal in exchange for a promise of respect for its sovereignty and existing borders. But Putin had no interest in that commitment.
Heusgen said a breaking point for Merkel came when she asked Putin about the “little green men” — masked Russian soldiers — who appeared in Crimea before the Russian annexation in March 2014. “I have nothing to do with them,” Putin responded, unconvincingly.
“He lied to her — lies, lies, lies,” Heusgen said. “From then on, she was much more skeptical about Mr. Putin.”
The U.S. and most of Europe — less so the states closest to Russia — glided on in the seldom-questioned belief that the Russian threat, while growing, was contained; that Putin was a rational man whose use of force involved serious cost-benefit analysis; and that European peace was assured.
The War in Ukraine
The unthinkable can happen. Russia’s war of choice in Ukraine is proof of that.
In the isolation of COVID-19, all of Putin’s obsessions about the 25 million Russians lost to their motherland at the breakup of the Soviet Union seem to have coagulated.
After President Emmanuel Macron of France met with Putin at opposite ends of a 20-foot table last month, he told journalists that he found Putin more stiff, isolated and ideologically unyielding than at their previous meeting in 2019.
That Ukraine got to Putin in some deeply disturbing way is evident in the 5,000-word tract on “The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” that he penned in his isolation last summer and had distributed to members of the armed forces. Marshaling arguments ranging back to the ninth century, he said that “Russia was robbed, indeed.”
His intent, in hindsight, was clear enough, many months before the invasion.
But why now? The West, Putin had long since concluded, was weak, divided, decadent, given over to private consumption and promiscuity. Germany had a new leader, and France an imminent election. A partnership with China had been cemented. Poor intelligence persuaded him that Russian troops would be greeted as liberators in wide swaths of eastern Ukraine, at least.
In a single stroke, Putin has galvanized NATO, ended Swiss neutrality and German postwar pacifism, united an often fragmented EU, hobbled the Russian economy for years to come, provoked a massive exodus of educated Russians and reinforced the very thing he denied had ever existed, in a way that will prove indelible: Ukrainian nationhood. He has been outmaneuvered by the agile and courageous Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a man he mocked.
It is as if, after a flirtation with a new idea — a Russia integrated with the West — Putin, who will be 70 this year, reverted to something deeper in his psyche: the world of his childhood after The Great Patriotic War had been won, with Russia in his head again liberating Ukrainians from Nazism, and Stalin restored to heroic stature.
Joe Biden correctly argues that the struggle between democracy and autocracy is the defining conflict of our time. So which system performs better under stress?
For the last several years the autocracies seemed to have the upper hand. In autocracy, power is centralized. Leaders can respond to challenges quickly, shift resources decisively. China showed that autocracies can produce mass prosperity. Autocracy has made global gains and democracy continues to decline.
In democracies, on the other hand, power is decentralized, often polarized and paralytic. The American political system has become distrusted and dysfunctional. A homegrown would-be autocrat won the White House. Academics have written popular books with titles like “How Democracies Die.”
Yet the past few weeks have been revelatory. It’s become clear that when it comes to the most important functions of government, autocracy has severe weaknesses. This is not an occasion for democratic triumphalism; it’s an occasion for a realistic assessment of authoritarian ineptitude and perhaps instability. What are those weaknesses?
The wisdom of many is better than the wisdom of megalomaniacs. In any system, one essential trait is: How does information flow? In democracies, policymaking is usually done more or less in public and there are thousands of experts offering facts and opinions. Many economists last year said inflation would not be a problem but Larry Summers and others said it would and they turn out to have been right. We still make mistakes but the system learns.
Often in autocracies, decisions are made within a small, closed circle. Information flows are distorted by power. No one tells the top man what he doesn’t want to hear. The Russian intelligence failure about Ukraine has been astounding. Vladimir Putin understood nothing about what the Ukrainian people wanted, how they would fight or how his own army had been ruined by corruption and kleptocrats.
People want their biggest life. Human beings these days want to have full, rich lives and make the most of their potential. The liberal ideal is that people should be left as free as possible to construct their own ideal. Autocracies restrict freedom for the sake of order. So many of the best and brightest are now fleeing Russia. The American ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, points out that Hong Kong is suffering a devastating brain drain. Bloomberg reports, “The effects of the brain drain in sectors such as education, health care and even finance will likely be felt by residents for years to come.” American institutions now have nearly as many top-tier AI researchers from China as from the United States. Given the chance, talented people will go where fulfillment lies.
Organization man turns into gangster man. People rise through autocracies by ruthlessly serving the organization, the bureaucracy. That ruthlessness makes them aware others may be more ruthless and manipulative, so they become paranoid and despotic. They often personalize power so they are the state, and the state is them. Any dissent is taken as a personal affront. They may practice what scholars call “negative selection.” They don’t hire the smartest and best people. Such people might be threatening. They hire the dimmest and the most mediocre. You get a government of third-raters (witness the leaders of the Russian military).
Ethnonationalism self-inebriates. Everybody worships something. In a liberal democracy, worship of the nation is balanced by the love of liberal ideals. With the demise of communism, authoritarianism lost a major source of universal values. National glory is pursued with intoxicating fundamentalism.
Putin seems to believe Russia is exceptional on front after front and “on the march.” This kind of crackpot nationalism deludes people into pursuing ambitions far beyond their capacity.
Government against the people is a recipe for decline. Democratic leaders, at least in theory, serve their constituents. Autocratic leaders, in practice, serve their own regime and longevity, even if it means neglecting their people. Thomas J. Bollyky, Tara Templin and Simon Wigley illustrate how life expectancy improvements have slowed in countries that have recently transitioned to autocracies. A study of more than 400 dictators across 76 countries by Richard Jong-A-Pin and Jochen O. Mierau found that a one-year increase in a dictator’s age decreases his nation’s economic growth by 0.12 percentage points.
When the Soviet Union fell, we learned that the CIA had overstated the Soviet economy and Soviet military might. It’s just very hard to successfully run a big society through centralized power.
To me, the lesson is that even when we’re confronting so-far successful autocracies like China, we should learn to be patient and trust our liberal democratic system. When we are confronting imperial aggressors like Putin, we should trust the ways we are responding now. If we steadily, patiently and remorselessly ramp up the economic, technological and political pressure, the weaknesses inherent in the regime will grow and grow.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Donald Trump Asked Kid Rock About North Korea and There Is No Bottom
The Daily Beast – March 27, 2022
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
Summing up the Republicans’ appalling conduct at the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearing, and Sen. Mike Braun’s interview where he said interracial marriage should be a question for the states, The New Abnormal co-host Molly Jong-Fast says “they’re never gonna be happy. They’re not gonna be happy when they take away abortion. They wanna go back to antebellum times. This ends with less and less rights.”
That’s anything but a joke, but “it’s funny because I remember thinking before the 2016 election, ‘Well, Trump won’t get elected,’ but even when he did I thought, ‘Wow, it’s so terrible, but they’ll get what they want and they’ll see how much it sucks.’ And they didn’t. They were thrilled. And then when Trump started killing his own people and telling them that the virus wasn’t a big deal, I thought, ‘Well, he’ll kill his own people. And they’ll see this guy’s a monster,’ but it seems like he can pretty much do anything. These Republicans can pretty much do anything and (their supporters) don’t notice that it’s against their interests.”
If not antebellum times, says co-host Andy Levy, “the most charitable thing you can say about them is that they want to go back to the 1950s. That’s the latest time-frame you can give them. They all think that the 1950s were grand, with the white picket fences and the nuclear families that all loved each other and to them, that’s the garden of Eden that they don’t care that first of all never really existed. And second of all, to the extent that existed, it existed for white Christians only, and it wasn’t even so great for white Christian women. But they don’t care, that’s their end game.”
Meantime, Kid Rock of all damn people is boasting about how Donald Trump would call him up after Sarah Palin introduced him and Ted Nugent to the president, and ask things like “What do you think we could do about North Korea?”
“I’m like, What? I don’t think I’m qualified to answer this.”
Then again, it could always be worse with this set. As Molly asks, “Do you think Kid Rock is stupider than Junior?” And, notes Andy, at least Kid Rock “was self-aware enough to know that he shouldn’t be talking, giving advice about North Korea.”
Plus, Florida Agriculture Commissioner and gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried—who went to high school with Judge Jackson—joins to explain how she won office in a red state and her bid to become its first female governor. She says the party needs to “follow my lead” to win again in the Sunshine State:
“The Democrats need to understand, once again, that it is always about the economy—it always has been and always will be. Of course, we have to stand up and we have to fight and we have to advocate for our people and our principles. But at the end of the day, the people of our state want leaders. They don’t want their elected officials to be falling into these cultural war traps, which Republicans are trying to do. We have an opportunity under my leadership to bring our party together, to unite our party and to fight for fundamental principles that—you know, might have been electing Republican governors for 25 years, but it’s by the smallest of margins by, by less than one percent, Ron DeSantis won by 34,000 votes out of almost 8.3 million votes.”
Fried concludes: “So to say that our state is red is not consistent with how we vote. And for those same 25 years, the people of our state have consistently voted for very progressive constitutional amendments, from a $15 minimum wage to medical marijuana to environmental issues to restoration of civil rights. But we as Democrats have not done a good enough job running campaigns, and making sure we are on the same page as the rest of the people of our state. So we have to take some playbooks by the Republicans on the economy, on home rule, on the free market. But really we’ve got to rise above this chaos and this nonsense and be ready to fight. There’s no one out there who doesn’t know that I am willing and able to throw punches. And most of the times I land them, and make the governor squirm every time that we are in the same room together. And that’s what it’s going to take to stand up against this bully and show the people of our state that there is a better way to lead.”
Market giants Larry Fink and Howard Marks say the Ukraine conflict will end globalization. Here are 3 key takeaways for investors.
Harry Robertson – March 26, 2022
BlackRock boss Larry Fink thinks the end of globalization is here.Taylor Hill/Getty Images
BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Oaktree’s Howard Marks have predicted that globalization is coming to an end.
The Russia-Ukraine war and COVID-19 are making companies and countries rethink their reliance on others, they said.
Deglobalization would have dramatic consequences for the economy, and for investors used to a highly integrated world.
Globalization has shaped the world for the last 30 years, but it’s now coming to an end. That’s the view of two of the world’s best-known investors, BlackRock chief Larry Fink and Oaktree chair Howard Marks.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades,” Fink wrote in his latest letter to shareholders last week.
A day earlier, Marks had shared a similar sentiment in one of his well-read memos. He said the war had made companies and governments realize how they’d become reliant on others.
“The recognition of these negative aspects of globalization has now caused the pendulum to swing back toward local sourcing,” he said.
But what exactly is globalization? Economists at the Peterson Institute define it as the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, people and cultures. It’s brought about by crossborder trade in goods and services, as well as by flows of investment, people and information.
An end to the process would have dramatic consequences, not least for investors, who have become used to a highly integrated world.
Here are three areas where the end of globalization — if it comes — could have a profound impact.
Global energy markets
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had a dramatic impact on the global economy and markets. No where is that more clear than in surging commodities prices. Brent crude oil, which stood at around $64 a barrel a year ago, is now trading at more than $110.
In Fink’s view, higher fossil-fuel prices will help drive the transition to green energy. That means the prospects for renewable energy companies could be bright in the medium term.
“More than ever, countries that don’t have their own energy sources will need to fund and develop them – which for many, will mean investing in wind and solar power,” Fink wrote.
Yet the BlackRock boss was less optimistic about the short term. A need to cut back on Russian oil has driven countries like the US to increase their own fossil-fuel production.
Many investors have pivoted toward energy companies and commodities, which plenty believe are set to keep rising over the next year as the war plays out.
Inflation
Closely linked to energy is the question of inflation. It’s above 5% in Europe and the UK, and has surged to a 40-year high in the US.
An end to globalization is likely to make things worse, Fink and Marks warned.
Marks highlighted how “offshoring” — in which companies use cheap foreign labor to produce their products — has led to a sharp fall in the cost of goods.
The end of that process could give working-class communities in the US and Europe a boost. But it could also drive up prices, simply because Western workers are more expensive.
“A large-scale reorientation of supply chains will inherently be inflationary,” Fink wrote. “Central banks must choose whether to live with higher inflation, or slow economic activity and employment to lower inflation quickly.”
Crypto and other opportunities
BlackRock’s Fink, who previously suggested bitcoin might be worthless, now thinks digital currencies may have a role to play in a deglobalizing world. He said the war will force countries to reconsider their currency dependency.
“A global digital-payment system, thoughtfully designed, can enhance the settlement of international transactions while reducing the risk of money laundering and corruption.”
Marks went into fewer specifics, but ended his memo on a hopeful note.
“After many decades of globalization and cost minimization, I think we’re about to find investment opportunities in the swing toward reliable supply,” he said.
Virginia Thomas with her husband, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas (left)
The wife of a US Supreme Court judge repeatedly pressed Trump White House staff to overturn the 2020 presidential election, US media has reported.
Virginia Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, reportedly sent 29 text messages to former adviser Mark Meadows, urging him not to concede.
Ms Thomas called Joe Biden’s victory “the greatest heist of our history”.
The texts are among 2,320 messages Mr Meadows provided to a committee investigating the US Capitol riot.
In the text messages, seen by CBS News and The Washington Post, she urged Mr Meadows, who was Donald Trump’s chief of staff, to “make a plan” in a bid to save his presidency.
“Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back”, she wrote on 6 November. It is unclear if Mr Meadows responded.
Ms Thomas also appeared to push QAnon conspiracy theories and urged Mr Meadows to appoint Sidney Powell, a conspiracy theorist and lawyer, to head up Mr Trump’s legal team.
“Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud,” Ms Thomas wrote. “Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”
Mr Meadows told Ms Thomas that he intended to “stand firm” and said that he “will fight until there is no fight left”.
The Trump campaign later distanced itself from Ms Powell, after she made dramatic claims of voter fraud, without providing any evidence, at several media events.
Virginia Thomas – who goes by Ginni – is a prominent Republican fundraiser. She was formerly associated with the Tea Party wing of the party, a hard-line conservative movement to which Mr Meadows was also affiliated during his time in the House of Representatives.
She has been married to conservative-leaning Justice Clarence Thomas for 35 years, and has insisted her activist work has no influence on her husband’s work with the Supreme Court.
Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving member of the US Supreme Court, having served since 1991, and is currently in hospital with “flu-like” symptoms.
Since the Covid pandemic began, however, Mr Thomas has become more vocal and participates in most oral arguments.
In February 2021 the Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump’s challenges to the elections result, however Mr Thomas dissented from the decision, calling it “baffling”.
Wife’s texts leave Justice Thomas in a difficult position
The revelation of Ginni Thomas’s conspiracy-minded text messages have prompted critics on the left to call for Clarence Thomas to be impeached and removed from his lifetime seat on the Supreme Court.
They point to his lone dissent from the Supreme Court decision ordering the release of White House documents to the congressional committee investigating the 6 January Capitol attack as evidence that he was secretly protecting his wife, who was closely involved in efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat.
Mr Thomas’s defenders counter that he should not be held responsible for the activities of his spouse and, in any regard, there are no ethical rules that apply to high court justices.
The impeachment process for Supreme Court justices is the same as those for US presidents – a majority vote in the House of Representatives and two-thirds to convict and remove in the US Senate. That’s an unreachable bar given the current partisan divide of the latter chamber.
In fact, only one US Supreme Court justice has been impeached by the House in US history. Samuel Chase was accused of political bias and misdeeds in 1804. He was acquitted in the Senate by a comfortable margin.
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Good Morning America
Ginni Thomas urged White House chief of staff to challenge election results, text messages show
Benjamin Siegel, Katherine Faulders, Joanthan Karl and Devin Dwyer
March 25, 2022
In the fall of 2020, after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the presidential election, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly urged White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to attempt to overturn the election results, according to text messages obtained by congressional investigators.
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Thomas wrote to Meadows on Nov. 10 after the election was officially called for Biden. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Sources familiar with the text messages, which were obtained by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, confirmed their authenticity to ABC News. The content of the messages was first reported by The Washington Post and CBS News.
Meadows, who did not respond to all of Thomas’ missives, texted in late November that Trump’s challenge of the election results was “a fight of good versus evil.”
“Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs,” he wrote. “Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”
“Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now … I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it,” Thomas replied.
PHOTO:In this Oct. 21, 2020 file photo White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows talks to reporters at the White House in Washington, D.C. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images, FILE)
The messages — more than two dozen between Thomas and Meadows in November of 2020, and one from Jan. 10 — were among the thousands of pages of text messages, emails and documents Meadows voluntarily turned over to the committee last year, before he reversed course and decided not to cooperate with the inquiry.
Thomas did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News. A spokesman for the committee declined to comment on the messages or their contents.
Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, told the Washington Free Beacon in March that she and her husband don’t talk to each other about their work.
“Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America,” Thomas told the conservative news outlet. “But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”
PHOTO: Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and Virginia Thomas while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation, Oct. 21, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images, FILE)
Thomas said that she attended the “Stop the Steal” rally outside the White House on Jan. 6, but left early because it was cold. She said she had no role in planning the event.
Regarding the attack on the Capitol, Thomas told the Free Beacon she was “disappointed and frustrated that there was violence that happened following a peaceful gathering.”
Ethics experts have raised questions about Thomas’ work on major issues that come before the Supreme Court, on which her husband sits.
In January, the court declined to block the Jan. 6 committee from obtaining Trump White House records over the objection of only one justice: Clarence Thomas.
“There were some eyebrows raised when Justice Thomas was that lone vote,” said Kate Shaw, ABC News Supreme Court analyst and Cardozo Law professor. “But he did not explain himself, so we don’t actually know why he wished to take up the case.”
There are no explicit ethics guidelines that govern the activities of a justice’s spouse, experts say, but there are rules about justices avoiding conflicts of interest. Federal law requires that federal judges recuse themselves from cases whenever their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
Only one of the nine justices dissented: Clarence Thomas.
At the time, Thomas provided no explanation for why he would have approved Trump’s request — a standard omission when the top court addresses emergency motions.
The Washington Post reported that in a message from November 6, 2020, Ginni Thomas told Meadows not to concede the election, saying “it takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” In a message November 10, 2020, Ginni Thomas declared Biden’s win “the greatest Heist of our History.”
In total, Ginni Thomas and Meadows exchanged 29 texts from November 2020 to January 2021, the outlet reported, all of which are now part of the trove of evidence the January 6 panel is investigating.
Meadows and Ginni Thomas didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider.
CNN reported Thursday that the committee obtained the texts from Meadows. The former Trump official is believed to have turned over thousands of text messages before he stopped cooperating with the House panel late last year.
Ahead of the Supreme Court’s order on Trump’s White House documents, Meadows filed a supporting brief in favor of blocking the release of documents.
Ginni Thomas has come under scrutiny in recent months over her conservative advocacy given her husband’s position on the nation’s highest court. Earlier this month, she acknowledged attending the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Capitol attack but said she got cold and left before Trump spoke.
She also denied having ties to the organizers of the rally after several news outlets reported that she was connected to January 6 rally organizers and served on the board of a conservative group that promoted overturning the 2020 election results.
Ginni Thomas has long been an active participant in partisan politics. In a recent interview with the Washington Free Beacon, she said she and her husband had their “own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too.”
“Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work,” she said.
What Ginni Thomas and Vladimir Putin have in common
Joel Mathis, Contributing Writer – March 25, 2022
Ginni Thomas and Vladimir Putin. Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock
You know what Ginni Thomas and Vladimir Putin have in common? They are both sealed inside information bubbles of their own making, to disastrous ends.
Let’s start with Putin. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gone badly, but why? Brian Klaas, a politics professor at University College London, says Putin blundered into the war because he didn’t have anyone around to tell him what he believed — that Ukrainians don’t really have their own national identity, that the invasion would be a cakewalk — might not actually be true. Klaas calls this the “dictator trap.”
“It’s what happens when authoritarian leaders make catastrophic short-term errors because they start to believe in the fake realities they’ve constructed around themselves,” Klaas said this week in an interview with Vox.
Maybe that sounds familiar. Echo chambers don’t just happen to dictators. Nowadays, thanks to social media and tailored TV channels, anyone can enjoy their own fake reality.
Take Thomas, a powerful conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The Washington Post reported Thursday on texts she sent to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, around the time of the Jan. 6 insurrection, urging him to help Trump “stand firm” in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Strikingly, the texts suggest Thomas really believed some of the outlandish right-wing conspiracy theories pushed by Trump and his allies. Here’s a text she sent Meadows, quoting one of those theories:
Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.
That obviously never happened. It’s not just wrong, it’s nutty. Ginni Thomas, with connections at the highest levels of government, should’ve known better. But like a lot of people who also attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, it seems she bought whatever right-wing websites were selling, no matter how far from reality. Contradictory facts and ideas — the truth that Joe Biden won — were filtered out.
Klaas thinks democracies are less susceptible to the dictator trap. Trump, he notes, obsessively watched CNN and MSNBC to see what people were thinking about him. But I’m not so sure that’s right. After all, it’s not been so long since American news organizations of all stripes — Fox News and the New York Times — coalesced around the shoddy case for a disastrous war. The Thomas texts suggest that even in today’s more-fractured and diverse media environment, it’s pretty easy to avoid disfavored voices and facts. And whether the information bubble is contained to one man or a large group of people, it can still have nasty consquences.
The tendency to believe only the facts we want to believe is a longstanding human foible. Not even society’s elites are immune. You don’t need to be a dictator to fall into the dictator trap.
Insider Marie Yovanovitch says it will take a ‘concentrated effort over a number of years’ to undo the ‘damage’ that Mike Pompeo did to the State Department
Sonam Sheth,Nicole Gaudiano – March 25, 2022
Representative Mike Pompeo (R-KS) testifies before a Senate Intelligence hearing on his nomination of to be become director of the CIA at Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 12, 2017.REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Yovanovitch told Insider that it will take “years” to undo the “damage” Pompeo did to the State Department.
He “presided over the hollowing out of a great institution,” she said.
The former ambassador accused Pompeo of being a hypocrite in her memoir and wondered if the State Department would “survive the betrayals of the Pompeo years.”
Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador told Ukraine, told Insider in a wide-ranging interview that it will take “years” to reverse the damage that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did to the State Department.
Pompeo “presided over the hollowing out of a great institution,” Yovanovitch told Insider. She added that Donald Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, “started it and Pompeo continued it, so there’s is lasting damage.”
President Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, made a commitment to following the rule of law, protecting diplomats and foreign service officers, and promoting US policy abroad when he took the helm at the department.
But “it takes a concentrated effort over a number of years not only to knit the fabric of the State Department back together again, but to give it the kinds of resources that are necessary for our diplomacy,” Yovanovitch told Insider.
The former ambassador didn’t mince words about her view of Pompeo in her new memoir, “Lessons From The Edge.” She struck a blunt tone when she said that Pompeo’s “hypocrisy was galling” and wondered if the State Department would “survive the betrayals of the Pompeo years.”
Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled from her post in Ukraine in April 2019 following a concerted smear campaign against her by Trump’s allies, led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. In her book, Yovanovitch discussed her pleas for the State Department, and Pompeo himself, to publicly support her against Giuliani’s efforts to discredit her work in Ukraine and bogus allegations that she was a partisan Obama holdover.
But Pompeo failed to protect her from the White House, Yovanovitch later testified to Congress. She was one of more than a dozen witnesses to testify at Trump’s first impeachment inquiry in late 2019. It centered around his efforts to strongarm the Ukrainian government into launching bogus political investigations into the Biden family while withholding vital security assistance and a White House meeting.
When congressional staffers began contacting her in mid-August 2019 — shortly before the impeachment inquiry was launched — to discuss “Ukraine-related” matters, Yovanovitch started thinking about hiring a lawyer.
“Although the department lawyers usually tried to watch out for State personnel, their job was to protect State’s interests, not mine,” she wrote. “I was a team player, but the past six months had shown me that I could no longer trust the coach.”
She also wrote that it was ironic that Pompeo pledged to work with “uncompromising personal and professional integrity” after being unable to guard her against Giuliani and Trump’s attacks on her. She recalled, in particular, the day that she flew back to Washington, DC, from Kyiv after being abruptly fired without cause.
The same day, Pompeo unveiled an “ethos statement” at the State Department “with great fanfare,” the memoir says. In addition to promising to work with “uncompromising personal and professional integrity,” the statement also promised to “show ‘unstinting respect in word and deed for my colleagues,'” Yovanovitch writes.
“Every Foreign Service officer I knew agreed with these points, but coming from Pompeo, the irony was too much to handle,” the book says. “We were all tired of Pompeo’s talk. We just wanted him to walk the walk. He didn’t need to swagger.”
Looking forward, the former ambassador told Insider that the way the US conducts diplomacy needs to be overhauled, in the same way that the US military reformed after the Vietnam War and intelligence services did after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Diplomacy in 2022 needs to “meet the challenges of the 21st century in a way that reflects many of the tools that we’ve got now that we didn’t have back in the day,” she said. One example she highlighted is the advent of social media and how journalists, activists, and governments use it to spread awareness about key issues of the day.
“When we respond on social media, we don’t have to have it approved by, you know, 20 different people in Washington, but we can be more nimble and more effective,” Yovanovitch said.
A top prosecutor who abruptly left the Manhattan DA’s office said in his resignation letter there’s ‘no doubt’ that Trump committed ‘numerous’ felonies
Sonam Sheth – March 23, 2022
Former President Donald Trump.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
A former top prosecutor from the Manhattan DA’s office said in his resignation letter that Trump is guilty of “numerous” felonies, NYT reported.
Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, who were leading the DA’s Trump probe, abruptly resigned last month.
Dunne and Pomerantz planned to charge Trump with falsifying business records, per NYT.
One of the two top prosecutors who suddenly left the Manhattan district attorney’s office last month said in his resignation letter that he believes former President Donald Trump is guilty of “numerous” felonies, The New York Times reported.
“The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did,” the prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, said in his resignation latter, according to The Times.
Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, the other senior prosecutor who was leading the DA’s criminal investigation into the Trump Organization’s business dealings, resigned in February after the new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, expressed doubts about moving forward with a case against the former president.
Pomerantz said in his resignation letter, dated February 23, that Trump was in fact “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it would be a “grave failure of justice” to not hold him accountable for his actions, according to The Times.
The report said that Pomerantz and Dunne had planned to charge Trump with falsifying business records, which is a felony in the state of New York.
But Bragg’s reluctance to pursue a criminal case against Trump, and Pomerantz and Dunne’s subsequent resignations, has thrown the fate of the longrunning criminal investigation into disarray.
A spokesperson for the DA’s office previously told Insider that “the investigation is ongoing” and “we can’t comment further.”
The DA’s office has fought to keep the resignation letters of Pomerantz and Dunne from becoming public.
The letters “reflect internal deliberations and opinions about an on-going investigation,” a records official told Insider in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.”Further, the documents reference matters attending a grand jury proceeding, which is exempt from disclosure.”
The DA’s office previously indicted the Trump Organization and its longtime chief bookkeeper, Allen Weisselberg, on 15 felony counts. Trump has not been charged with a crime.
The first round of charges stemming from the inquiry, brought against the Trump Organization and Weisselberg, zeroed in on alleged tax-evasion schemes. But the investigation later shifted to focus on whether the Trump Organization, and Trump himself, artificially inflated or deflated the value of assets for loan and tax purposes, respectively.
The DA’s investigation had recently homed in on whether Trump exaggerated his financial net worth when applying for loans. His longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, cut ties with him earlier in February after determining, based on revelations from a separate civil investigation by the New York attorney general’s office, that ten years of his financial statements “should no longer be relied upon.”
Related:
Manhattan prosecutor who resigned says Trump guilty of felonies
Reuters
Manhattan prosecutor who resigned says Trump guilty of felonies – New York Times
March 23, 2022
FILE PHOTO: Former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – One of the prosecutors who had led a New York criminal probe into Donald Trump and his business practices said in a resignation letter last month that the former president was “guilty of numerous felony violations,” the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Mark Pomerantz, who resigned on Feb. 23 after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had indicated to him he had doubts about pursuing a case against Trump, also said it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold Trump accountable, according to the Times.
“The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes – he did,” Pomerantz wrote, according to the Times, which published what it said was the letter.
In the United States, criminal defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance had said in court filings that the office was investigating “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct” at the Trump Organization, including tax and insurance fraud and falsification of business records.
Pomerantz did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters. Ron Fischetti, a lawyer for Trump, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither the Trump Organization nor its lawyer Alan Futerfas immediately responded to requests for comment.
The Times quoted Fischetti as saying charges against Trump were not warranted and applauding Bragg for not pursuing the case.
Another prosecutor, Carey Dunne, resigned on the same day as Pomerantz. Bragg, who took office on Jan. 1, was not confident the prosecutors could demonstrate Trump had intended to inflate the value of his real estate, the Times reported.
A spokeswoman for Bragg, Danielle Filson, told the Times the investigation was continuing.
A civil investigation into Trump and the Trump Organization is being conducted by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump has previously denied wrongdoing and said the state and city investigations were politically motivated.
(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Mary Milliken, Noeleen Walder and William Mallard)
